Maxwell for Cinema 4D
Plugin Manual
plugin version 3.0.0

Maxwell for Cinema 4D

The Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin has been designed to make using Maxwell with C4D as seamless and efficient a process as possible. To this end, the new plugin adds fully-integrated Maxwell Materials, along with a native-to-C4D Material Editor which is built to work in a way which is very similar to Maxwell's own MXED MXM editor.

Supported Platforms

The download package contains binary plugin files for PCs running 32- or 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system, as well as Apple machines running OSX 10.7 or greater on Intel processors. Four separate downloads are available, one for Cinema 4D R9.6-R11, one for Cinema 4D R11.5, one for Cinema 4D R12-R13, and one for Cinema 4D R14-R15.

Installation

Installation is similar to that of other C4D plugins and consists of un-zipping the downloaded package and placing the unzipped folder into the /plugins sub-directory of your C4D program directory. For more detail, please see the readme.txt file in the unzipped plugin folder.

What is covered in this plugin manual?

This manual includes all the information you need to know to use the Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin. It goes into the details of some general Maxwell concepts, but it is not intended to replace the regular Maxwell Render manual, which may be found in your Maxwell installation directory. If any non-plugin-related parameters are not explained sufficiently here, please consult the regular Maxwell Render manual for further direction.

What do I need to know to use the plugin?

The new Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin has been designed to work in as simple a manner as possible. Wherever appropriate, unnecessary items have been optimized away, leaving what is intended to be a very simple and straightforward, yet complete, interface to Maxwell from within C4D.

Plugin Quick-Start

It is entirely possible to render with Maxwell using only a Scene object. The plugin will automatically convert native C4D materials into Maxwell materials at export time, if there are no explicit Maxwell Materials assigned. This is not recommended, of course, as automatically-created materials are not likely to look as good or perform as well as custom Maxwell Materials.

Similarly, it is not really necessary to create a Camera tag, unless you wish to use Maxwell-specific features like Z-Clip. All of the commonly-adjusted parameters of a camera are inferred either from C4D's Render Settings, or from the Scene's Default Exposure group, found in the Output tab. The Object Properties and Rendering Region tags are also strictly elective, as their basic purposes are to exclude information.

So, to begin with, all you really need to do is create a Scene. To do that, click 'Scene' in the plugin's main menu:

In the C4D Attribute Manger, you should now see this:

This is all you need to render using all of the default settings. If you were to have a simple model already built when you created the new Scene, clicking on the 'Render Render View' (the first button) would get you an image something like this:

As you can see, the defaults use Maxwell's Physical Sky and Sun. Possibly, this image is a bit too 'bright' for your taste – that is easy to change – just use the parameters in the 'Default Exposure' section of the Scene:

Adjust the EV (Exposure Value) parameter to 15, since the objects in the scene are a bit bright. After doing so, render again:

Too dark now, let's try EV=14:

As you can see, the EV parameter makes it very easy to adjust the exposure – higher numbers are required for brighter environments, and vice-versa. There is a chart at the end of this manual with suggested EVs for different scenarios.

Now, let's apply some Maxwell Materials. The easiest way to do this is to use the C4D Content Browser and Material Manager. Browse to your Maxwell program directory (you have already installed Maxwell, or else you would have gotten an error the first time you clicked render), then to one of the material folders inside of the materials database/mxm files directory. Just drag any .mxm file from the Content Browser over into the Material Manager – once it is in the C4D document, you can drag it onto objects just as with any other material. Here, I have changed the scene bit and assigned two Maxwell Materials:

Moving back to the camera side of things, let's create some DOF (depth-of-field) in this image. First, what is needed to do that? Probably, the scene will need to be smaller; go to Cinema's Preferences > Units and change the Basic Units to Centimeters (the cubes should be a few cm in size now). Also, we will want to open up the Maxwell camera's aperture a bit, so change the fStop (it's located directly under EV in the Default Exposure group) to 2.7. When 'Lock exposure to EV' is checked, it is possible to adjust fStop without also affecting the exposure of the image; the plugin will maintain a consistent EV, regardless of the chosen fStop. Here's what we get after making these changes:

Okay, so we are seeing some DOF here, but unfortunately, none of our subjects is in focus. Let's add a C4D camera so that we can change the camera's focal distance. Add the camera, set the active viewport to use it, and then drag the focal distance to the place we want to be in focus; I'll use the cube in the background:

Moving the camera's focus to the cube in the foreground, we get this:

Keep in mind; the only Maxwell-specific objects we've created up to this point are a Scene and two Maxwell Materials. Let's use some of the other Maxwell objects; right-click the C4D camera (or the Scene object) and add a Maxwell Camera tag. This tag will override what we've set up in the Scene's Default Exposure group, so set the Exposure to match what we've set up there. Then, enable the Z-Clip planes and adjust them so they cut away part of the geometry:

Now, let's add a Rendering Region. Again, right-click the C4D camera (or the Scene object) and add a Maxwell Rendering Region tag. In the Attributes Manager, adjust the Left, Top, Width, and Height to specify the region which should be rendered:

Note, due to the way that C4D draws things in your viewport; it will be easier to use the Rendering Region if the object it is attached to is near the bottom of your object hierarchy in the C4D Object Manager.

Moving on, let's remove the Maxwell Camera and Region Rendering tags and try out an Object Properties tag. Right-click one of the cubes and add the tag. Adding it to the blue cube, and enabling the 'Hide from Camera' checkbox results in an image like this:

All of the 'Hide from X' settings in the Object Properties tag are fairly self-explanatory; just consult the regular Maxwell Render manual for more details on what they are used for. Besides for those tags, the Object Properties tag also has a switch for disabling Motion Blur. Before we use that, let's just try using Motion Blur. Disable the 'Hide from Camera' checkbox in the Object Properties tag and select the Scene again. In Scene > Output > Options, enable the 'Object Motion Blur' option. Next, define two key frames and positions for the objects. Set the timeline to a frame such that the objects would be located elsewhere in the previous frame; then, render the Scene:

Now, select the Object Properties tag again and check the 'Disable' checkbox in the Motion Blur group; then, render again:

Now, to switch gears a little, let's change from using Physical Sky and Sun, to using an Image Based Environment. Go to the Scene's Environment tab, un-check the 'Sun' checkbox, and choose Image Based from the Type drop-down. The interface will change to show you settings for Image Based Environment. By default, the Scene will have the 'Use Background for all Channels' enabled – you only need to un-check this if you want to use different HDR images in the Background, Illumination, Reflection, and Refraction Channels. Many times that is not necessary though, and you can just let the plugin copy the settings from the Background Channel into the others at MXS-export time.

So, click on the […] browse button in the Background Channel group to select a HDR image to use. Once you do, the Background Channel group will expand, showing the Scale, Offset, and Intensity parameters. Usually, you may not need to change these values. What you may want to do though is to check the 'Show in viewport' checkbox near the top of the Image Based Parameters section – this will allow you to preview the HDR image in the C4D viewport.

Here is how the Scene renders (after disabling 'Object Motion Blur') using the Image Based Environment:

It was also necessary to adjust the EV down to something more like 9, since there is less light in this scenario.

To wrap things up, let's texture one of these objects using the Maxwell Material that is applied to it.

First, we should select the Material, and then go to the Attribute Manager and un-check the 'Link to' checkbox under MXM Linking. The reason for doing this is because when a Material is created by dragging it from the Content Browser, it will be set to link with the MXM file which was dragged. As such, any changes we make to that Material in C4D will be lost next time we open the document, because the Material will automatically update itself using the MXM file it links to. We are going to add a texture, so we do not want this.

After turning off MXM Linking, double-click the Material in the Material Manager to open the plugin's Material Editor; this Material will be selected and shown in the editor. In the layers tree on the left side of the Material Editor, select one of the BSDF layers in the Material:

Now, click the texture-browsing button for the Reflectance 0 channel and use the Texture Editor to choose a texture. Next, set a texture to use in the Bump channel, and then set the Bump value to 5. Click the 'Refresh Preview' button, located to the lower-right of the Material's preview image to refresh the preview. Next, click the small 'eye' button next to the 'Refresh Preview' button; this will show a list which allows you to set one of the Material's textures as 'active':

Once you select one of the textures, it will be shown in the viewport. You can switch which texture is shown at any time, or choose the '(none)' item to show the Material's basic color again. Rendering with the newly-textured Material results in this image:

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Why does the plugin tell me it can't find a necessary directory?

On Windows, the Maxwell installer creates an environment variable named MAXWELL2_ROOT, and sets its value to point to the Maxwell 2.0 installation directory on your machine. This allows plugins to find Maxwell. If the plugin has told you that you do not have a MAXWELL2_ROOT, it probably means that you either have not installed Maxwell Render 2.0, or that the Maxwell installer was unable to set the variable correctly.
To resolve this, go to Start > right-click My Computer > choose Properties > go to the Advanced tab > and click the Environment variables button. This should get you to a window like this:

Make sure that there is a System variable named MAXWELL2_ROOT, and that it points to the Maxwell folder on your machine. Also, make sure if there are MAXWELL2_ROOT variables in both the User and System sections that they both point to the same directory, otherwise the plugin may not be able to find your real Maxwell directory.

If you get this message on OSX, it means that OSX cannot find the Maxwell 2.0 application directory. Check your installation (and the trash) to make sure that you do not have multiple Maxwell installations.

Question: Why don't my emitters seem to emit any light?

Most likely, you are not modeling using a realistic scale. Maxwell is based on physical reality, and its camera requires the objects it is capturing to be modeled at a realistic scale. Similarly, Maxwell emitter materials are defined using real-world units. If you are not modeling at a realistic size, the correlation between the surface-area which is emitting the light and the total power output of that light will not match, and you will either have emitters which are much too bright, or much too dark. Put another way – if you spread 40 watts of energy over a surface the size of a football field, how much light will you see coming from one square foot of that field? Probably none, or nearly so.
Question: How can I preview HDR images in the C4D viewport?
Create a Scene object, go to its Environment tab, set the Environment Type to 'Image Based', select a HDR image using the Background Channel's path browse button, then check the 'Show in viewport' checkbox.
Scene (object)

Exporting and rendering of MXS files with the Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin is always accomplished through the use of a Scene object. A new Scene is created using the 'Scene' item, found in the plugin's main menu:



A C4D document may contain as many Maxwell Scene objects as you wish. Each Scene holds a complete set of parameters, and the values for any given Scene object are used when that Scene is exported to an MXS file. The various parameters are divided into four basic tabs:




Output: contains parameters which affect properties of the MXS file being exported, and how that export is to be accomplished.
Engine: contains parameters related various options exposed in the Maxwell rendering engine, Maxwell Render.
Environment: contains parameters related to the MXS environment, i.e. whether the Scene will use the Maxwell Sky Dome, Physical Sky, or Image Based environmental lighting.
Cinema: contains parameters which control how the plugin exports native C4D lights and procedural textures, as well as a global scale modifier you can use to scale the exported mesh geometry.
At the top of the Scene object's user-interface, you will find several buttons which are used for exporting that Scene to MXS files and rendering in various ways:



Render (Render View & Active View)
The 'Render Render View' button exports this Scene to an MXS using the resolution defined in C4D's Render Settings > Output section. The 'Render Active View' button does the same, but uses the resolution of the active viewport. When the export is finished, the resulting MXS file is then rendered using the Maxwell Render render engine. If these buttons are disabled, it means that the plugin was unable to locate Maxwell Render on your system; in that case, you should check that Maxwell Render is properly installed (see the MAXWELL2_ROOT FAQ).
Export to Studio

This button exports this Scene to an MXS file and then opens it in Maxwell Studio. If this button is disabled, it means that the plugin was unable to locate Maxwell Studio on your system; in that case, you should check that Maxwell Render is properly installed (see the MAXWELL2_ROOT FAQ).

Export to Network

This button exports this Scene to an MXS file and then sends it to the Maxwell Network Render system.

Export MXS

This button simply exports this Scene to an MXS file.

Send to Maxwell Fire

This button exports and links this Scene to Maxwell Fire.

In addition to these per-Scene MXS-export controls, the plugin also provides duplicates located in the plugin's main menu/toolbar:



These commands will act on the Scene which was last 'touched'; if no Scene has yet been created or selected, these commands will be disabled.

Scene :: Output

The Output tab contains several groups which control how MXS files are written and exported.

Output (main group)

This group contains parameters which control where the files created by the plugin and Maxwell will be written.

Name

This is the name which will be used to generate the various filenames required to write MXS files. This includes the file name of the MXS file, the image-output file, and the MXI file. This should be specified as a name with no extension; the appropriate extensions will be inserted as necessary by the plugin. The Name should therefore also not contain characters which are illegal for use in file paths. If no name is entered here, the plugin will first try to use the Output Name specified in the Preferences page, or else it will try to use the current document name. The image format (the main RGB output) which will be written may be chosen from the drop-down list
Folder
This is the root folder used for the plugin's output. MXS, image, and MXI files will be written to this location. If procedural textures need to be exported, they will be written into a 'textures' folder located inside the one specified here. If no folder is specified here, the plugin will try to use the Output Folder specified in the Preferences page, or else it will try to use the current document location. If it is unable to determine the current document location (for example, when the document has not yet been saved), it will try to use the current directory, which will likely be either the location of C4D itself, or the location it was started from. To open the current output folder, just click the folder button at the right.

Export Options

This group holds parameters which affect how the exported MXS file will be written.

Disable Maxwell Instances

This option simply disables the export of Maxwell Instance objects on a global basis.

Auto-generate instances

This option is not related to the Maxwell Instance Object provided by the plugin. Rather, what it does is to automatically identify objects which are candidates for instancing during export. For example, if there are two cubes in the scene, both with the same name and mesh-topology, then only the first will be exported as a mesh – the second will automatically be exported as an instance in the MXS. This is suitable for use with things like emitters, which generate a great number of similarly-named objects, the topology of which is identical between instances, with the only difference being each object's transformation.
Note that use of this option has the potential for producing confusing results. This can happen when geometry is created by a generator, where that geometry effectively has no local transformation. This could include situations such as those where a spline is swept or extruded, with the resulting polygons simply being created in global space. A quick way to check whether this is going to be a problem is to run Current State to Object on the generator; if the generated polygons have no local transformation, they will not work well with instance auto-generation.
Generally speaking, this option should only be used in versions of Cinema prior to R11.5, before Cinema had true instancing.

Protect MXS

This option determines whether or not Maxwell Studio will allow the meshes in the MXS being written to be exported or not. If this is enabled, the MXS will be 'locked'; that is, third-parties will not be allowed to extract meshes from the MXS via Maxwell Studio, thereby providing a way of providing third-parties with actual MXS files for various purposes while still offering some protection of the intellectual property they contain.

Pack and Go

When this option is activated, the plugin will scan through all files referenced in the scene (i.e. texture, ior, hdr, etc.) and copy them to the output directory during export. The paths contained in the exported mxs will point to the new copies, rather than the original files. This makes it much easier to transport an entire scene to another location.

Strict Mode

When this is enabled, while writing an MXS file, the plugin will enable textures which are not able to be found. This will result in error messages being reported by the render engine.

Check Paths

This button brings up a dialog containing a report which shows all external files referenced by Maxwell materials and objects, indicating which were able to be found, which were not, and which missing files were able to be found using search paths.

Motion Blur & Animation
This group is only shown when the 'Export Animation' option is enabled. When a Scene is exported with Animation enabled, the plugin will cause the C4D document to be animated, exporting a sequentially-named MXS file for each frame. There are a few parameters which control how the animation export is done.

Pre-roll Timeline

When this option is enabled, the plugin will animate the document through all frames prior to the one being exported. This can be helpful, as it makes sure that all generators and expressions have been properly run, ensuring a consistent result at the current frame. This is not free (that is, it can take some time to run the document through its frames) so only enable this option when necessary.

Shutter-based Blur

When enabled, the amount that objects and cameras will be moved along the timeline is figured based on the shutter value of the camera being exported. So for example, given FPS (specified in Cinema Render Settings, not the camera) of 24 and a shutter speed of 1/24, each object will appear to move one frames-worth of movement along the Cinema timeline. Given a shutter of 1 second, the object will appear to move 24 frames, with the movement being centered on the frame being exported.

Export Animation

This option determines whether or not the plugin will export in single- or multiple-frame mode. The Animation group is not shown in the Scene user-interface unless this option is enabled.

Camera Motion Blur

Similar to the Object Motion Blur option, this controls whether or not to export Motion Blur information for the camera.

Object Motion Blur

When this is enabled, the plugin will move objects backward and forward along the timeline in order to figure Motion Blur. When Shutter-based blur is enabled, the amount that objects are moved will be dependent on the shutter value of the camera being used. Otherwise, objects will be moved half of a frame forward and backward, in reference to the frame currently being exported.

Motion Blur Steps

This number determines how many times the plugin will sample the exposure range for object positions when calculating object motion blur. If, for example, this value is set to 2, then only the starting and ending positions of objects will be written. More positions will cause the motion blur to more closely follow objects which move arbitrarily during the exposure.
Animation Frame Range
This group is only shown when the 'Export Animation' option is enabled. When a Scene is exported with Animation enabled, the plugin will cause the C4D document to be animated, exporting a sequentially-named MXS file for each frame. There are a few parameters which control how the animation export is done.

Use Render Settings

This determines whether to use the frame-range and step count set in the active C4D Render Settings, or to use a custom range.

Step

This parameter controls how many (if any) frames to skip between MXS exports. If this is set to one, all frames will be exported, whereas if it were set to two, one frame on the timeline would be skipped for each one that was exported. If the animation frame range was ten, and the Step size was also set to ten, then only one frame would be exported.
Render from…to
When the 'Use Cinema Range' option is disabled, these inputs control the range of frames which will be exported. If the 'to' value is less than the 'from' value, the animation will be done in reverse – under these circumstances, Motion Blur will also be figured in reverse, if it is enabled.

Default Exposure

Most of the parameters for the camera which appears in the exported MXS are taken directly from the C4D camera's physical properties, and certain aspects of C4D's Render Settings. Even so, a C4D camera lacks some features which are integral to the way that Maxwell works; for the most part, these are related to exposure. This group contains parameters which will be used to control the exposure when no actual Maxwell Camera Tag is found at export time.
For information on these parameters, please see the Camera Tag topic on page 47.

Render Channels

Options in this group control the various different image outputs which may be rendered by Maxwell Render. 'Render'is the main output image. The other channels are used for compositing in a third-party application like Photoshop – see the main Maxwell Render manual for more details on the various channels.
Scene Presets

A complete Maxwell Scene object may be saved to an external XML file for later use, or for sharing.

Additionally, the plugin uses a preset file named 'default_scene.xml', which may be found in the plugin's /res directory to set the default values for each new Scene object you create. This makes it easy, for example, for a multi-user office to make sure that all of the machines using the Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin are using identical default settings – they just need to distribute new 'default_scene.xml' files to each machine.
Note: if you have used C4D's own 'Save as Default' option with a Maxwell Scene, the settings contained in your 'default_scene.xml' file will no longer have any effect. To reverse this, remove the Scene from your defaults folder.

Scene :: Engine

The Engine tab contains several sub-groups which control parameters used by the Maxwell Render render engine,

Engine (main group)

This group contains parameters which affect various aspects of the rendering engine (i.e. Maxwell Render) itself, which is a standalone application that runs in a separate process from the host application and plugin.

Render time

This is the maximum time Maxwell Render will render before stopping. As it is possible to stop Maxwell Render at any time, it is generally best to leave this set to a higher number of minutes than will be necessary to obtain a clear image.

Sampling level

Maxwell Render will stop when it reaches this SL (Sampling Level), or the Render time value, if the specified SL is not reached before the Render time has elapsed.
CPU Threads
This parameter specifies how many threads will be spawned by the Maxwell Render render process. Setting this to zero will cause Maxwell Render to auto-detect and render using all available CPU resources. Setting the number of threads to [CPU count – 1] represents a trade-off between rendering speed and machine responsiveness, in case the machine must be used for other purposes while rendering.

Command line

The plugin (like all Maxwell plugins) does not directly contain any rendering functionality. Rather, it is an MXS file exporter. To render the MXS files it produces, it uses the Maxwell Render rendering application. Maxwell Render runs from a command line, and different command-line flags are supplied by the plugin to start it rendering on an exported MXS file. In addition to the flags passed by the plugin, you can also enter any other Maxwell Render command-line flags you wish in this text box, and they will be added to the flags that the plugin gives Maxwell Render.

Quality

Determines whether to use Maxwell Render's production or draft (i.e. the same engine used in Maxwell Fire) engine.

Priority

Determines whether or not Maxwell Render will be started as a low-priority process. This is the same as adding –p:low to the command-line.

Multilight

Maxwell's Multilight feature allows you to control the intensity of your lights while you render, or after you have finished rendering. Two modes are provided: Intensity and Color. Note that it takes a great deal more memory to use this feature, so do not enable it if you do not intend to use it.

MXI Output

Determines whether Maxwell Render will write a single MXI file, one for each light, or none at all.

Fire Options

Sampling Level and Threads directly control their parameters in the Fire render engine, while the Quality parameter determines the actual size of the image being rendered (the image is interpolated to fit the current size of the Fire window).

Tone Mapping

These parameters correspond to those of the same name as seen in the Maxwell Render user-interface. For technical details on the meaning of these parameters, see the main Maxwell Render manual.
SimuLens

Maxwell Render provides access to the image-enhancing features known as SimuLens.

Aperture & Obstacle Maps
These maps are used by the SimuLens Diffraction feature, if they are specified. Several example maps may be found in the 'Simulens maps' folder inside the Maxwell folder on your machine
Diffraction
SimuLens is able to simulate camera lens-diffraction effects. it is not recommended to enable Diffraction from the plugin, since Maxwell Render will apply it at each image update – rather, wait until the image is finished and apply Diffraction using Maxwell Render.
Scattering
This parameter simulates light-scattering caused by the camera's lens. Since this scattering is figured by Maxwell Render at each image update, it is recommended (in the interest of reducing render-time) to leave this disabled, then apply it to the final image via Maxwell Render's user-interface when the image has finished rendering.

Devignetting

By default, Maxwell Render simulates realistic vignetting (i.e. the darkening around edges of images); to disable this, check the Devignetting option and set the reduction value between zero and one-hundred percent to vary the amount of vignetting seen in the final output image.

Materials

Setting the path to an MXM file in the Override material field will cause all non-emitter objects to be rendered using this MXM rather than whatever they may have explicitly assigned. The Default path can be used to set which MXM should be used for objects which have no explicit material assigned. If it is blank, a standard 153,153,153 diffuse MXM will be created under your user folder and the path to it will be given to Maxwell Render to use as default for non-assigned objects.

Render Layers
Though Maxwell naturally calculates all possible light interactions in a scene, it is possible to inhibit certain types of calculation using the toggles found in this section. The specific light-interactions which each of these options affect should be fairly self-explanatory, for more details, see the regular Maxwell Render manual.

Scene :: Environment

The Environment tab controls the environment which will be used in the exported MXS, and contains all of the parameters necessary to control each Environment Type. There are four types of environment available; Sky Dome, Physical Sky, Image Based, and None. The environment for a Scene is set by using the drop-down list contained in the main Environment group. The Sun may be enabled regardless of which environment type is chosen. When the Sun is enabled, the Sun Indicator group will be shown:

When the Sun Indicator is enabled, the direction of the Sun will be shown in the viewport, using a yellow line and sphere. As date, time, location, or Scene Rotation is changed, the indicator will be updated in real-time, allowing for an intuitive prediction of where shadows will appear in the rendered image:

Use the Sun Indicator's Scale Factor to adjust how far away from the Scene Object's origin the sphere will be drawn. The indicator may be moved to a convenient location by changing the position of the Scene Object; the indicator is drawn relative to this location.

Additionally, if a light with a Sun Expression tag is found during export, then the position of the object controlled by the expression (when the expression is enabled) will be used to set the Sun's direction in Maxwell, rather than what is specified in the Scene Object being rendered.

Sky Dome Parameters

When Sky Dome is chosen as the Environment Type, the scene will be lit by a sphere of light. The intensity, zenith, and horizon colors are individually controlled using the parameters of the same names. The Mid Point parameter determines the angle from the horizon at which the horizon and zenith colors are evenly mixed.

Physical Sky Parameters

When Physical Sky is chosen as the Environment Type, the scene will be lit by an all-encompassing dome of light generated by Maxwell to simulate the appearance of a natural sky. How this sky appears is controlled by a set of parameters divided into three basic groups:

• Sun Parameters:control the power and color of the Sun and the basic reflectivity of the planet
• Gas Parameters:control the amount of ozone and water vapor in the air
• Aerosol Parameters:control the characteristics and concentration of particulates in the air

Physical Sky parameters may also be loaded or saved using Maxwell .sky files, just click the 'Load' or 'Save' buttons. Note, .sky files hold more than just atmospheric data; they include the date, time, location, and whether or not the Sun is enabled.

Sun temperature: Temperature of the sun's spectral radiation. The default value of 5777 is the most common value measured outside the Earth's atmosphere.
Sun power: A multiplier that controls the amount of light emitted from the sun. Higher values than the default 1.0 will make the sun emit more light, lower values will emit less.
Planet reflectance: Controls the percentage of light reflected from the planet surface back into the atmosphere.
Turbidity Coefficient: Defines the concentration and amount of particles in the atmosphere. A value of 0.0 means a perfectly clear sky (in which case the next three parameters won't have any effect). 0.01 is a good value for low turbidity, e.g. a sky containing very few aerosols, which will appear almost clear. 0.040 is a good medium value and 0.3 is a fairly high value.

Turbidity Coef. 0.0,Turbidity Coef. 0.04Turbidity Coef. 0.3
Raising the turbidity coefficient in sunset situations will darken the sky. Remember that you can also alter the EV of the camera in these cases, which can create an interesting sky:

Turbidity Coef. 0.0, EV=15Turbidity Coef. 0.1, EV=15Turbidity Coef. 0.1, EV=12

Wavelength Exponent: Defines the average size of the particles in the atmosphere. The particle size influences which wavelengths of light are absorbed and which are scattered. Higher values than the default will increase the saturation of the sky, until gradually it turns first green and then orange:

Wavelength Exp. 1.2Wavelength Exp. 5.0Wavelength Exp. 10.0

Reflectance: Refers to the albedo of the aerosols, or the rate of energy scattered and absorbed by the aerosols.

Scattering Asymmetry: This factor controls the anisotropy of the particles, that is, in which direction most of the light will be scattered. Positive values will produce a halo effect around the sun, brightening the area around it:

Scattering Asym. -0.7Scattering Asym. 0.0Scattering Asym. 0.7

Ozone: the amount of ozone gas in the atmosphere, measured in the centimeter-height of a column of atmosphere. The default value is 0.4.

Water: The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. It is measured in centimeters, in the same way as ozone.

Location & Time

The Location & Time group will be shown whenever it is applicable, i.e. when any of the following conditions are true:

• the Sun is enabled
• the Environment Type is Physical Sky
• the Environment Type is Image Based, the Image Based environment uses Physical Sky for disabled channels, and there are disabled channels or channels with invalid paths

The Latitude and Longitude parameters may be set manually, or automatically, by choosing a city from the drop-down list. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) will be figured automatically by the plugin regardless of how the location is specified. The Ground Rotation parameter rotates the environment in a range from 0 to 360 degrees, allowing you to change which direction is North without physically changing the C4D scene.

Export Environment as HDR
The Physical Sky may be exported to an HDR file. Clicking 'Export' will export an HDR using the resolution set in C4D's Render Settings, while clicking 'Export Viewport' will export using the active viewport's resolution. Enable the 'Use custom resolution' option to export an HDR using a custom size.

Image Based Parameters

The Image Based Environment Type allows you to light the scene using HDR images. There are four Image Based Channels provided:

Background: this image will be seen where the background is directly visible to the camera

• Illumination:this image will be used to illuminate the scene
• Reflection:this image will be seen in reflections in the scene
• Refraction:this image will be seen where light is refracted in the scene

Each channel shares a few similar parameters and a similar operation:

Source: sets whether the channel uses a file, the active Sky, links to the Background Channel, or is disabled

• Path: this is the path to an .mxi, .hdr, or .exr file which will be used in the channel
• Scale U/V:scales the input image in width and height such that n-number of tiles will be fit into the mapped area
• Offset U/V:shifts the image up or down by n-percent
• Intensity:alters the basic output power given to this channel's image
• Screen Mapped: this parameter is only present in the Background channel. It causes the Background channel to be mapped flat against the image plane, rather than spherically. This mode cannot be shown in the C4D viewport

Parameters which have no context, given the state of other parameters, are not shown. For example, until a channel's path has been set to point to a valid file, nothing is shown for that channel except for the path chooser. When a path has been specified, but the channel is not enabled, all of the parameters, except for the path and the 'Enabled' checkbox, will not be shown.
Besides for these per-channel parameters there are a two other main parameters available in the Image Based Environment Type:
Use Interpolation
This option turns on render-time pixel-interpolation for environment HDR images.
Intensity Multiplier
The Intensity parameter of all image-based channels will be multiplied by this value.

Viewport Display

Determines which channel, if any, to display in the C4D viewport.

Viewport Resolution

Sets the size of bitmap to use for displaying IBL channels in the C4D viewport.

Image Based Sky Type

This drop-down is only shown when necessary; it determines the type of environment to use for channels which are either disabled, or are explicitly set to use the active sky.

Scene :: Cinema

The Cinema tab contains parameters which tell the plugin how to deal with native C4D objects that have no correlation in Maxwell Render itself, and therefore require some sort of translation.

Cinema (main group)

Export Units

The output of the Scene will be scaled using this value. If it is set to 'Cinema Basic Units', objects will be exported at the size they are drawn in Cinema, according to the Basic Units setting in Cinema's Units preference page. There are several other scale presets available as well.
If any of the named presets are chosen, then the document will be exported such that a unit specified in the Cinema UI, no matter what the Cinema Basic Units setting, will be treated as the unit chosen here. So, though the Cinema UI may be showing the width of an object as 200mm, choosing Inch here will result in the object being exported at 200 inches wide. Similarly, if you choose Custom here, a numeric input will be shown:



In this case, the values specified in the Cinema UI will be interpreted as meters, and will then multiplied by the given value; so as shown above, the exported size of the 200-unit wide object will be 200 meters X 0.01, or two meters.

Lights

The Lights group contains parameters which control how the plugin translates native C4D lights into mesh-geometry in the exported MXS file.
Create Physical Lights

Enables or disables the translation of native C4D lights into meshes and emitter materials during export.

Hide from Camera/Hide from Reflections and Refractions

This determines whether or not the meshes generated will have the Maxwell object-flags of the same names set. This is useful for when you have C4D lights which would be visible to the camera, either directly or indirectly, and you wish them not to be.

Omni-light segments

Determines the number of radial segments which will generated omni-light meshes will have. Do not use more detail here than necessary, since Maxwell render-time is adversely affected by emitter-geometry with large numbers of individual mesh-faces.

Omni-light radius

This determines the radius given to the sphere generated for an omni-light.

Round spot-light segments

Similar to the 'Omni-light segments' parameter, this controls how many radial segments will be used when generating spot-lights. Spot-lights are slightly more efficient in this regard than omni-lights, since the plugin can generate a simple disc for the spot-light's emitter mesh, rather than an entire sphere.

Procedurals

Maxwell always uses textures which are specified as a path to an on-disk image file. As such, the plugin must render any C4D procedural textures out to disk when it performs automatic conversion of C4D materials to Maxwell materials during export. The parameters in this group are used to control how those procedural textures are rendered.

Render to disk

Enables or disables the export of C4D procedural textures. When enabled, procedural textures found in native C4D materials during export will be rendered out and saved to files placed in a 'textures' directory, under the location specified in Scene > Output > Folder.

Render all textures

When enabled, textures which are specified by disk path will be rendered by their shaders, instead of simply passing their disk paths to Maxwell. The purpose of this is to enable animation of parameters for such textures.

Use Interpolation

Enables or disables the Maxwell texture's 'interpolation' option for all generated textures.

Sampling Size/Width/Height

This sets the resolution that native C4D procedurals will be saved to during export. Choose one of the pre-defined sizes from the drop-down, or choose 'Custom' and set the desired size using the Width and Height parameters

Maxwell Fire

Maxwell Fire provides an interactive rendering experience from within the plugin.

How it works

To activate Fire, it is first necessary to have a Scene Object; at any given time, only one Scene Object can be the object being rendered in Maxwell Fire. To activate Maxwell Fire, show the Scene Object in the Attributes Manager and click the grey 'Fire' button:


Once the Scene has been linked to Maxwell Fire, the Fire button will change color, and another button will appear to its right:



The new button is used to re-send the scene to Fire; this is necessary when objects have moved, or when material assignments have been changed; these actions are not interactive. Notice as well that (in version R11.5 and higher) the Object Manager icon for the Scene Object also changes to the yellow Fire icon, making it easy to tell which Scene is currently rendering in Fire. To unlink the Scene from Fire, simply click the yellow Fire button again, or link another Scene.
Additionally, a new Fire Options group will appear in Scene Object > Engine tab:



This group is only visible when the Scene is linked to Fire. Sampling Level and Threads directly control their parameters in the Fire render engine, while the Quality parameter determines the actual size of the image being rendered (the image is interpolated to fit the current size of the Fire window).
When the Scene is linked to Fire, the Fire window will be opened, if necessary. There are also a very few controls in the Maxwell Fire window itself:



The first button enables or disables Fire rendering without unlinking the associated Scene. The second is a duplicate of the re-send button in the Scene Object's Attributes Manager interface; it causes the scene to be freshly exported to Fire. The third button allows you to save the current Fire image to disk. At the right-hand side, there is a toggle which switches between 'Render' and 'Active' camera modes; in Render mode, only the current rendering camera will be shown in Fire, while in Active mode, which ever viewport is active will be rendered. By default this is toggled to Render mode, to allow for adjusting the camera in viewports other than the one being rendered.
At the bottom of the Fire window is a progress bar, and buttons for warnings and errors from the engine; if the scene contains errors, click the buttons to find out what is preventing the render from proceeding.



When Fire is active, changes to materials, Scene parameters, and cameras are fully interactive and require no special actions to update. As mentioned previously, changes which affect the scene physically, such as the addition, removal, or movement of objects, or the assignment of materials to objects, will require that the Scene be re-exported.
Maxwell Fire is also used in the plugin's Material Editor, and allows changes to materials to be visualized interactively. You may set the number of threads allocated to the material preview renderer in the plugin's Preferences page.
Material (material)

To create a new Maxwell Material, either use C4D's Material Manager (as with any material), or click the 'Material' item in the plugin's main menu.

Plugin Materials and Maxwell MXM Files

Firstly, it is important to recognize that there is a difference between an MXM file on your hard disk and a Maxwell Material contained in a C4D file – they are not the same thing, though they are very similar. It is necessary for the plugin to have its own 'version' of Maxwell MXM materials, so that it can save them directly inside of C4D documents. If it did not do so, Maxwell materials could only exist as file paths stored in the document which reference MXM files on your disk. While this is entirely possible to do, and even preferable for some workflows, it means that in addition to a C4D file, you also need to bring along any number of physical MXM files with you when you want to transfer a document from one machine to another. Furthermore, it is prone to error, since directory structures most likely will not match from one machine to the next, and this often results in broken MXM links, and material assignments which do not produce any valid Maxwell material during export.
As such, a Maxwell Material in the Maxwell for Cinema 4D plugin may operate in one of two modes: either linked to an MXM file on your machine, or embedded directly in the C4D document. To control whether a Material behaves as linked or as embedded, use the MXM path and 'Link to' options in the Material's C4D Attribute Manager interface:



When a material is linked to an MXM file, the 'Material Editor' button will be disabled; linked materials must be edited using Maxwell MXED. Similarly, the user-interface shown in the plugin's Material Editor window will be the same as what is found in Cinema's Attribute Manager; this is done for the same reason – any edits made to the linked material would be lost next time the document was opened. To understand why this is the case, continue reading about MXM Linking on the next page.
In order for a Material to use Linked mode, it is necessary that its MXM path points to a valid MXM file. When this is true, and the Linked mode is enabled, the Material's preview will appear (in the Attribute and Material Managers and in Texture Tags) with a green border:


If a Material is set to use Linked mode, but the specified MXM file is not able to be found, it will appear with a red border:


If a Material is not set to use Linked mode, no border will appear:

How does MXM Linking work?

MXM Linking is completely optional; that is, the full definition of the Material is always stored (i.e. embedded) in the C4D document. This ensures that no matter where you open a C4D document, it will still be able to be rendered in Maxwell the same as it did the last time it was saved. How it works in practice is this:

a C4D document is opened

the plugin reads the Materials stored inside

for each Material which was saved with MXM Linking enabled, the plugin reads its MXM path, and checks whether an MXM file is found at this location (or at any location found in the various search paths)

if the MXM file is found, the Material is immediately updated with the contents of that MXM file. If however, the MXM file is not found, nothing further happens – the definition of the Material which was found in the document will be used at render-time

Therefore, the MXM Linking feature of the plugin offers the ability to reference central MXM files in individual C4D documents, thereby allowing you to change how Materials in multiple documents render just by editing one MXM file, while simultaneously handling scenarios where a specified MXM file is not found, or where the Material is not set to reference any MXM file at all.
Note that, it is possible to modify a Material using the plugin's Material Editor, regardless if it is linked or not – these changes will not be written back out into any linked MXM file. If you do not wish to lose such changes (i.e. next time the document is opened, the linked MXM will be read again), use the 'Export as MXM' item in the Material Editor's MXM Options menu.
Material Editor
To open the plugin's integrated Maxwell Material Editor, either click the 'Material Editor' button in the Material's Attribute Manager interface, or click the 'Material Editor' item in the plugin's main menu. This will bring up the plugin's integrated Material Editor, which is very similar to Maxwell MXED (as noted in the MXM Linking section, a linked material does not show this interface; it shows the same interface as the Attribute Manager):



Main Menu
Create > New Material
This item creates a new basic lambertian Material with Reflectance 0 of 153, 153, 153.
Create > From MXM
This item prompts for the path to an MXM file, which it then uses to create a new Material.
Create > AGS, Opaque, Transparent, Translucent, Metal, Car Paint
This creates a new material that uses the Maxwell Render Material Assistants feature.
Create > Standard
Creates a new Material using one of five Material templates:
Diffuse: creates a simple diffuse Material.
Emitter: creates an Emitter Material, using either RGB and power values, or an MXI/HDR texture, if one is specified.
Dielectric: creates a simple dielectric (transparent) Material. The Color value will be used as the Material's Transmittance color, as will the color map, if one is specified. Specifying an Abbe value other than 160.0 will activate Dispersion in the new Material.
Metal: creates a simple metallic Material using one of six pre-defined metals; aluminum, cobalt, copper, gold, nickel, and silver.
Plastic: creates a two-BSDF (Color Base & Gloss) plastic Material. The basic color of the Material is specified using the Diffuse Color value, or the Color texture. The Specular Color value is used in the Gloss layer's Reflectance 90 color channel.

MXM Options > Import MXM Data

As implied by the name, this imports MXM data into an existing Material, replacing its current state entirely.

MXM Options > Export as MXM

This item exports the current state of this Material to an MXM file. When this is done, the option is given to link the Material being exported to the target MXM.

MXM Options > Edit with MXED

The main purpose of this item is to give access to any advanced capabilities of MXED, which may not be available in the plugin's own Material Editor.

MXM Options > Open MXED Browser

This is just a shortcut to opening the MXED MXM browser. Due to the technical details of how C4D works, drag-drop from the browser behaves differently depending on where MXMs are dropped. When dropped over the Material Editor's preview image, the MXM will be imported into the scene. If an entire folder is dropped, the MXMs inside will be imported to the scene. It also works in a similar way when MXM files are drag/dropped from Explorer or Finder. Unfortunately though, when MXM files are dropped from Explorer or Finder into the C4D Material Manager, C4D interprets this as a File > Open operation, and creates a new C4D file rather than allowing the plugin to import them, so it is not recommended to drag-drop from Explorer/Finder into the C4D Material Manager window – drop them onto the Material Editor's preview image instead.

MXM Options > Browse MXM Gallery

This command opens Maxwell MXED's MXM Gallery Browser, which allows you to search the online database of MXM materials:

When you have located the MXM you would like to download, simply click the 'Import' button in the search window to import the selected MXM file into the Scene. The file will be downloaded and unzipped to one of two places:

• if the current document has not been saved, the MXM and related files will be saved to [documents]\Maxwell\mxmgallery
• if the current document has been saved, the MXM and related files will be saved to a new folder named mxmgallery, which will be created in the same directory as the current document

During this process, all files referenced by the newly-downloaded MXM will be placed in a textures folder under the mxmgallery folder. The paths inside of the MXM file will be altered to point to the new location, since many MXMs from the MXM Gallery contain paths which will not exist on your machine.
Material Overview Pane

This portion of the Material Editor window is used to control the global state of the Material.

Material Preview

Double-clicking the preview will start a preview-refresh (as with MXED). Dragging an MXM file from the Cinema Content Browser, MXED MXM Browser, or Explorer/Finder and dropping it here will cause it to be imported into the scene.

Select Active Texture

Sets which one of this Material's textures will be shown in the viewport (if it has any textures) using a drop-down menu. To show the basic color of the Material again, select (none) from the menu.

Enable/Disable Real-time Preview

This sets whether the material editor will refresh the preview automatically whenever a material parameter is changed. It may be useful to disable it when rendering in Fire, to allow your CPU to work on the Fire image without getting slowed down by attempting to keep material previews updated in real time.

Note that for technical reasons, in C4D versions prior to R12, this option is contained in the plugin's Preferences panel (page 51), rather than here as a button in the material editor.

Refresh Preview

This button simply requests that a new material preview be rendered.

Material Layers Tree

Similar to the tree found in MXED, this control allows you to define the structure of the material. New components are added by right-clicking the desired parent component and choosing what to add (i.e. right-click a Layer to add a BSDF). Child components may be re-ordered under their parent by dragging them from their current position and dropping them on their parent node; this will put them at the top of the list.
Components may be copied by holding down CTRL while executing a drag-drop action; rather than moving the dragged component, a copy of it will be added to the target node.
Additionally, individual components may be dragged back and forth between the Layers tree and the various pages in the Database Manager; this makes it easy to build new materials from pre-defined components.

Material Page
The parameters in this page apply to the Material as a whole. Each Material saves its own Preview Options, so that different MXS preview scenes may be used for different types of Materials. The MXS preview scenes listed in the Scene drop-down are those found in the Maxwell/preview directory. In addition to specifying individual bump maps in each BSDF layer, it is also possible to supply a bump (or normal) map here which will be used to affect the material as a whole.

Dispersion

This switch enables the calculation of dispersion. Dispersion is the 'rainbow' effect seen when light is split based on its different wavelengths as it passes through refractive materials. Enabling this option can raise render times because of the extra math involved in calculating these wavelength-based refractions.

Matte

Materials which have this switch enabled will cause the background (i.e. Physical Sky, etc.) to show through all geometry where the objects they are assigned to are seen by the camera. This can be useful for creating composite images.

Shadow

Materials which have this switch enabled will have the objects they are assigned to casting shadows when the Shadow channel is rendered (see Output > Render Channels > Shadow).

Material ID Color

This is the color which will be used for this material when the Material ID channel is rendered.

BSDF Page

The operation of this page is similar to that of the BSDF page in MXED. When certain parameters in the page are grayed-out, it means that they would have no effect; they will become enabled when other parameters have been changed in such a way as to make them effective.
When Reflectance > IOR is set to 'Measured Data', all of the parameters in the Reflectance group will be grayed out, since they have no effect in this case. Similarly, the min/max Thickness controls in the SubSurface group are only enabled when (a) Single Side SSS is enabled, and (b) an SSS Thickness map is assigned and enabled.

Layer Page

The operation of this page is similar to that of the Layer page in MXED.

Coating Page
The operation of this page is similar to that of the Coating page in MXED. Similar to the BSDF page, the parameters in the Reflectance group will be hidden when Reflectance > IOR is set to 'Measured Data', since they have no effect in this case.

Displacement Page

The operation of this page is similar to that of the Displacement page in MXED. Note that while MXED allows a separate Displacement layer to be added to each Layer, the plugin does not, instead placing Displacement at the Material-level. Functionality is similar, because in MXED, one of the several possible Displacement layers must be chosen – in other words, only one Displacement may be specified for the material. The plugin therefore chooses to display this relationship as it is in the layers tree.

Emitter Page

The operation of this page is similar to that of the Emitter page in MXED. The contents of the page change based on which Input type is currently selected.

Texture Editor

The operation of this window is similar to that of the Texture Editor window in MXED. Changes made to all parameters except for 'Real Scale (m)' and 'Filtering' will be shown both here in the Texture Editor's preview window, and also in the viewport, when this texture has been chosen as its parent material's viewport texture. The 'Preview size' parameter determines how detailed of a texture should be generated for use in the C4D viewport – larger sizes will require more processor time. Each parameter also has a 'reset' button to make it more convenient to return to the default value.

For convenience, the following key-modifiers are taken into account when adjusting texture parameters:

• CTRL: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent component (BSDF, Coating, etc.)
• SHIFT: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent Layer
• ALT: apply change to all textures in this texture's parent material

The browse button acts as a toggle; that is, if there is no path set, it prompts for you to select the path to an image, otherwise it clears the currently-set path.

Notes on the use of the Texture Channel Parameter

Maxwell Render supports multiple sets of UV coordinates on each mesh. These UV sets are referenced in the material using the Channel parameter; so, if an object has two sets of UVs, the decision of which to use for any given texture is determined using the Channel parameter: those which use Channel 0 will use the first set, while those which use Channel 1 will use the second.
In the Cinema texturing system, however, there exists no explicit way of associating a single material (that is, a single Texture Tag) with multiple sets of UVs. The plugin introduces a method for working around this, which consists of placing on the object multiple Texture Tags which reference the same Maxwell material:



In this case, the plugin will write multiple sets of UVs for the object. The UVs for the first Texture Tag will be written to Channel 0, those of the second will be written to Channel 1, and so on. In this way, it is possible to export different sets of custom UVs for use with the various textures contained in the Maxwell material.
Instance (object)
The Instance object allows you to create lightweight duplicates of C4D geometry. Instances are 'lightweight' in two ways:

• during modeling, they do not create in-memory duplicates of the geometry they target. Instead, they either draw bounding-boxes for each piece of geometry being instanced, or else they are represented by a single constant-size box, circle, or just a point
• during export and rendering, they are represented in the MXS as Maxwell instances. Each instance takes only a very small amount of memory, as compared to the mesh which it duplicates

This object should be considered as being deprecated. It was primarily developed to allow for the robust use of Maxwell instances in versions of Cinema prior to R11.5, which lacked a true instancing capability. In versions of Cinema R11.5 or better, Cinema's own Instance object, with its Render Instance option enabled, should be preferred.

Reference Object

This link specifies which C4D object will be instanced. This link accepts any C4D object and other Maxwell Instance objects as well. If the linked object has other objects under it, they will also be instanced, so it is possible to create lightweight duplicates of complete object-hierarchies using a single Maxwell Instance object.

Display

These parameters determine how the instanced geometry will be represented in the C4D viewport. In the interest of performance and to use the least memory possible, Instances do not draw full 3D representations of their target objects. Instead, they draw simple bounding-boxes, or optionally, a simple circle or point.
If the 'Auto-size' parameter is enabled, then the Instance will use the actual size of the geometry it is duplicating to draw bounding-boxes in the viewport. Since this applies to all of the referenced object's children as well, working with 'Auto-size' requires some processor time. If you do not require this type of representation, you may disable 'Auto-size'; when this is done, the Instance will not inspect the reference object at all. Instead, it will simply draw a point or a box or circle whose size will be determined using the Instance's Size X/Y/Z parameters. You may also specify another object to use for the display; its bounding box will be drawn.


Camera (tag)
The Camera tag contains four groups which are used to control those parts of the Maxwell camera which have no matching parameter in C4D. The Camera tag may be attached either to a C4D camera, or to the Scene you are working with.

Exposure

These parameters determine the camera's exposure.

EV

EV, or Exposure Value is a number used to express the basic exposure which will be seen in the exported MXS. EV may be used to set the exposure directly, where brighter scenes will require a higher EV, or it may be used as an exposure readout when setting fStop, Shutter, and ISO manually. For example, an outdoor photo during the daytime may require an EV somewhere around 12-16, while a dark candle-lit scene may require a value much lower, maybe around 4-6. Charts containing recommended EV for various lighting conditions can be found online (see the end of this manual for a chart from wikipedia.org).
EV is not actually a parameter found on Maxwell cameras – it is a theoretical value which is continuously figured by the plugin itself. The 'Lock exposure to EV' option is provided for one basic reason: while exposure may be adjusted manually using different combinations of fStop, Shutter, and ISO, it is possible to adjust the DOF (depth of field) on the camera using the fStop without also affecting the overall exposure of the shot when the plugin is allowed to maintain a given EV. This allows you to adjust the camera's exposure and DOF on a totally independent basis, and this makes setting up exposure much easier and more predictable.

fStop

A camera's fStop refers to the size of its aperture. Lower numbers denote a larger aperture, which exposes the camera's sensor to more light. Additionally, a larger aperture reduces the camera's DOF (i.e. 'depth of field'), or the distance between the nearest and furthest points which will appear in focus. Smaller apertures (higher fStop numbers) result in a greater DOF, but expose the camera's sensor to less light. Therefore, as the fStop is increased, the exposure must be compensated. This can be done manually, by adjusting the camera's shutter or ISO values, or it can be handled automatically by the plugin by enabling the 'Lock exposure to EV' option. When the exposure is locked to the EV, changes to fStop will not affect the overall exposure of the output image, since the plugin will adjust the camera's shutter as necessary to maintain a consistent exposure.

ISO

As with a physical camera, the ISO parameter affects the camera sensor's light-sensitivity. It is not necessary to adjust ISO directly when 'Lock exposure to EV' is enabled.

Shutter

Specified in units of 1/second, this parameter controls how long the camera's Shutter is to remain open. As with the ISO parameter, it is not necessary to adjust the camera's Shutter directly when 'Lock exposure to EV' is enabled. For convenience, the current FPS value is also shown here.

Aperture

The parameters in this section determine the type of lens to use, and also the angle and number of blades used in the camera's aperture, when the Diaphragm type is set to 'Polygonal'. These properties affect the 'bokeh' effect seen in highlights located in out-of-focus portions of the image, which can also be customized using the Custom Bokeh option & parameters.

Rotary Shutter

These parameters express the camera's theoretical rotary shutter angle given a specified frames-per-second rate. The FPS value is always taken from the Frame Rate setting in the current C4D Render Settings.

Z-Clip Planes

When enabled, Maxwell Render will clip any geometry nearer or further than the Near and Far distances defined here. These distances will also be shown in the viewport as red and blue 3D planes when this section is enabled.

Rendering Region (tag)

The Rendering Region tag is placed on a Cinema camera, or a Scene Object, and used to define a visible rectangle to use with Maxwell's Render Region and Render Blow-up features. As it is implemented as a persistent tag, rather than a dynamically-selected 'rubber-band' region, the Rendering Region tag offers the ability to consistently render the same region multiple times if necessary, or to divide up a large rendering into smaller portions without needing to know the actual pixel dimensions involved.

Options

The parameters in this section are used to enable or disable this Rendering Region (it will be ignored when disabled, or when its camera is not active), to change the colors used to paint it on the screen, and whether it will be used to perform Maxwell's Render Region or Render Blow-up function. Render Region simply excludes all pixels outside of the specified rectangle from the rendering (i.e. they will just be rendered black), resulting in a faster render of the desired pixels. Render Blow-up uses the specified rectangle to zoom in on the viewport, and renders the selected rectangle at the full height or width of the output resolution.

Rectangle

The Left and Top parameters define how far from the left and top edges of the rendered area the rendering rectangle begins. The Width and Height parameters define the size of the rectangle, as a percentage of the rendered area's height/width.
Object Properties (tag)
The Object Properties tag is used to control various aspects of an object (or group of objects).
Miscellaneous

Object ID Color Determines the color of this object when the Object ID channel is rendered.

Opacity Allows rendering the object semi-opaque, regardless of material.

Backface Material Specifies a material that will be assigned to the back of mesh faces.

Boolean When enabled, this object will be used to cut other geometry.

Custom Alpha Channels Adds this object to the specified (one per line) named Custom Alpha channels.

Blocked Emitters Add emitter objects here to exclude this object from their illumination.

Visiblity

Hide: Completely hide this object in the render.

• Hide from Camera: Hide this object from being seen directly by the camera.
• Hide from Refl/Refr: Hide this object from reflection/refraction calculations.
• Hide from GI: Hide this object from the global-illumination calculation.
• Hide from ZClip: Hide this object from Maxwell's Z-Clip feature.

Geometry

• Ignore Normal tag Ignores this object's Normal tag, if it has one.
• Ignore Phong tag Ignores this object's Phong tag, if it has one.
• Smoothing Applies post-export normals smoothing (or controls smoothing after subdivision).
• Subdivision Applies render-time subdivision to the mesh.

Motion Blur

• Disable: Prevents this object from rendering with motion blur.
• Point-level: Enables motion blur for objects which are deformed by animation.

MXS Reference (object)
The function of the MXS Reference object is to allow you to link a Maxwell MXS file into your scene at export-time.

Path

This is simply the path to an MXS file. The geometry may be scaled and positioned as usual via the Coord. tab. When an MXS file is loaded, it may be opened in Maxwell Studio by clicking the Studio-icon button.

Display

These parameters determine how the reference geometry will be represented in the C4D viewport. Depending on the nature of the geometry, it may be desirable to use bounding boxes (one is created for each mesh in the MXS), or points, which are taken from the mesh vertices contained in the MXS file. Use the detail parameter to control how many points are drawn:


Source MXS Detail: 10% Detail: 100%

Notes

Objects contained in MXS files are always defined in terms of a meter scale. In C4D, however, an arbitrary scale factor may be in effect. For example, consider an MXS file which contains a one-meter cube, centered at 0,0,0 in space: it has vertices at +/- 0.5 in each quadrant. If this MXS is referenced while C4D's units are set to meters, these coordinates will mean +/- 0.5 meters in C4D, just as they do in the MXS file. If, on the other hand, C4D's units are set to millimeters, these coordinates will have a different meaning: the cube will appear to be 1 millimeter in size. In order to represent the cube at its natural size, as defined in the MXS file, one would need to scale the MXS Reference 1000x using the scale values in the MXS Reference object's Coords tab.
To help with this, the plugin queries the current units setting whenever an MXS Reference object is created, and pre-sets its scale values to make it appear at the correct size in the context of the current C4D unit system. If the C4D units are subsequently changed, the MXS reference will naturally maintain its current size with respect to the other objects contained in the scene. When the document is exported, depending on the Scale Units setting in the exporting Scene Object, the size of all MXS references will be scaled as necessary, in order to obtain a WYSIWYG result. Maxwell Sea (object)
This object produces a sea surface, at render-time, generated using Next Limit RealFlow technology:




The overall size of the object is set using the Size X, Y, and Z values; the remaining parameters are explained in detail in the regular Maxwell Render documentation.
Maxwell Hair (tag)
The Maxwell Hair tag, when applied to a Cinema hair object, exports hair using the MaxwellHair extension (or optionally, one of the Maxwell Grass extensions, rendering grass blades instead of hair).

Enabled

Export of hair can be disabled temporarily using this switch (a Maxwell Hair tag must be present for hair to be rendered at all).

Primitive

These parameters control the size and type of hair strands (or grass blades) that will be rendered.

Root Width (mm)

Sets the width of the root of each hair (or blade).

Tip Width (mm)

Sets the width of the tip of each hair (or blade). The value used should be smaller than the Root Width value.

Type

This controls the type of hair primitive rendered. The Cylinder type is the standard round hair primitive. The Flat type uses the Maxwell MGrassP grass extension, which renders segmented grass blades, and is the fastest-rendering blade type. The Curve type uses the Maxwell MGrassH extension, which renders blades as analytical curves; this produces the highest-quality blades, which are curved smoothly regardless of the distance from which they are viewed, but which take somewhat longer to render.

Export Options

The only options, currently, are concerned with hair root UVs, which can be exported according to the domain of the hair bounding box, or based on the UVs of a certain object.

Raytrace UVs

Enables or disables the tracing of hair root UVs based on the object linked in the UV Source object. Note that it can take considerable time to trace UVs for hair, and that the time taken will increase, the more polygons that the UV Source object has. If root UVs are not required, it is recommended to disable this option.

Max. Distance

This controls the maximum distance for the ray test, in model units. For example, here is hair being generated on a plane, but tracing its UVs from a tilted disc:

UV Source

When the Raytrace UVs option is enabled, the object linked here will be used to generate root UVs for the exported hair. For example, here are 100K hairs, with UV Source linked to a texture-mapped plane, with Raytrace UVs disabled and enabled:

The object hierarchy being rendered above is this:

As shown in the above images, with Raytrace UVs disabled, hair root UV coordinates are generated based on the bounding box of the hair. With it enabled, the first segment of each hair is traced backward to the UV Source object in order to find UV coordinates for the hair.
The images also demonstrate how UVs for hair are mapped. In Maxwell, textures are mapped to hair length and root by assigning them to texture Channel 0 and 1. The material being used above consists of two layers, each with two BSDFs. Each layer uses the same black-to-white gradient texture, on texture Channel 0, and inverted in one of the layers. Each pair of BSDFs is identical, with the Reflectance 0° color of one being set to red and the other to blue. Using a checkerboard texture in each BSDF's Weight map, mapped on texture Channel 1, the above pattern is produce.
Maxwell Grass (tag)
The Maxwell Grass tag provides access to the new grass extension, introduced in Maxwell Render 2.7. Where grass is applied per-object in Maxwell Render, it may be applied to an entire hierarchy of objects in the plugin. For instance, given this object hierarchy:



The rendered result will be as such (the file checker.png, assigned to the grass Density map, is the same one used for Reflectance 0° in a diffuse BSDF, in the material assigned to the plane and sphere):



Most of the parameters contained in the Maxwell Grass tag are directly translated, so for information on those, see the standard Maxwell Grass documentation. Following is information pertaining to the parameters contained in the tag's Display group, which apply to how the tag works inside the plugin.

Display

The functions and parameters contained in the Display group are used to display grass in the Cinema viewport.

Enabled

This simply enables or disables the display of grass in the Cinema viewport. If viewport vectors have not yet been generated, this checkbox is disabled.

Generate & Release

These buttons are used to generate grass vectors for display, or to release vectors (in the interest of freeing memory) which have been generated.

Percent & Max. Blades

These parameters work with the grass Density parameter to control how much grass to generate for the viewport.

Scene Scale Link

Since you may have any number of Scene Objects, and since each one may have its own export scale, the Maxwell Grass tag cannot, on its own, determine the scale you wish to observe in the viewport. If no link is specified here, the tag will use the effective scale of the Cinema document; otherwise, its scale factor will be used to scale the grass.

General Notes

The display of grass has been designed to mimic the display of Cinema's hair system. So, when the tag is not selected, the grass vectors will be drawn, using either a neutral grey color, or a color derived from the material assigned to the grass tag, if one is assigned. When selected, points will be drawn at the end of each blade, and a green circle will be drawn at its base, aligned with the first blade segment. Here is the above scene, shown in the viewport, while the grass tag (which has a green material assigned) is selected:



Note that because generating the grass is a potentially expensive operation, it is not updated automatically; if you move or alter objects which have been used to generate grass vectors in the viewport, it will be necessary to update them by clicking the Generate button again.
Maxwell Particles (tag)
The Maxwell Particles tag determines how Cinema Particle Emitter and Particle Geometry objects are exported. Depending how options are set, they result in the creation of a MaxwellParticles Extension object, or a mesh with a MaxwellCloner (modifier) Extension. Particle Emitter objects will only be exported using this tag if they do not contain geometry; otherwise, they will be exported the same as in previous versions of the plugin. Particle Geometry objects are not specifically considered in the export, unless they have (or inherit) a Maxwell Particles tag, meaning that they may also produce real geometry, depending on how the particles are set up; addition of a Particles tag will not prevent export of this geometry.

Enabled

Export of particles can be disabled temporarily using this switch (a Maxwell Particles tag must be present for particles to be rendered at all).

Geometry
Parameters in this section determine the nature of each exported particle.

Particle Radius

By default, Cinema particles are exported as analytical spheres using the MaxwellParticles Extension. For Particle Emitters, exported spheres are one export unit in radius, modulated by the object's End Scale and Scale Variation values, with the tag's Particle Radius value being used to scale the particle cloud globally (this uses the MaxwellParticles Radius Factor parameter). For Particle Geometry objects, the size of each sphere is determined by the Size value of each individual particle (the Size parameter in PStorm, for example), where 1.0 means 1.0 export unit. The entire group will then be scaled using the Particle Radius value.

Clone Object & Use Clone

If a Polygon Object has been specified in the Clone Object link, and Use Clone has been checked, particles will be exported as clones of that polygon object, using the MaxwellCloner Extension, rather than as spheres. When this is the case, some other parameters in the tag (Particle Radius, Particle Age, and Particle Mass) will have no effect, since they relate only to MaxwellParticles export.

Scale Factor

This value will be used to scale the geometry specified in the Clone Object link.

Scale with radius

If this is enabled, each clone will also be scaled according to information contained in its Cinema particle data. For Particle Emitters, the radius does not change, but for Particle Geometries, it is also necessary to make sure that the Particle Radius array is exported.

Align to velocity

If this is checked, each clone will be oriented such that its Y axis aligns with its particle's velocity vector.

Motion Blur

These parameters simply enable and scale motion blur for the exported particles. The initial amount of blur depends on the velocity of each particle, and on the shutter speed of the camera.

Array Loading

Several different arrays of data may be involved in rendering particles. Since it is desirable to keep memory usage to a minimum, the following options are provided, for the purpose of loading the various arrays of data selectively. Several of the arrays also have a related Channel ID; if during export, an array is enabled, then custom UVs will be generated for the particle cloud, on the specified texture channel.

Particle Radius

Since Particle Emitters do not output particles of differing size, this option will have no effect on them. Particle Geometries may export differing particle size, though, so if you want this information to be reflected in the export, be sure to enable this option. When exporting clones, be aware that the Scale with radius option will have no effect, unless Particle Radius loading is enabled.

Particle ID

Each particle can have a unique (integer) identifier. This is used to establish coherency of particles between frames, so it is important for things like Object ID color, and for the creation of extra particles (i.e. the export of Extra Particles per Particle). In the case of Particle Geometries, this ID is assigned by the Thinking Particles system. No such ID is provided by a Particle Emitter, so in that case, the particle's index in its array is used as an ID.

Particle Age & Mass

When exporting a Particle Geometry object, per-particle Age and Mass values may be generated by Thinking Particles. Enabling these options will cause these values to be written into the particle cloud.

Extra Particles per Particle

The Maxwell particles system can optionally generate extra particles for each particle defined in Cinema. The Quantity value simply specifies how many extra particles to generate. The Dispersion and Deformation parameters control how the cloud of extra particles is generated. Dispersion sets the size of the cloud of extra particles, around each exported particle. Deformation sets the amount of deformation of the new particles cloud along the speed vector of the original particle. Note that in order to achieve good results, the Particle ID array needs to be exported when using this feature.

Maxwell Volumetric (tag)
The Maxwell Volumetric tag produces a volumetric region at render-time:





This tag may be placed on a Null, an RF Particles Importer, or Particles Emitter/Geometry:

• On a Null, it controls a Constant or Noise 3D Field, or references an RF bin file.
• On an RF Particles Importer, the RF bin file is taken from the RF Particles Importer.
• On a Particles Emitter or Geometry, native Cinema particles define the volumetric.

The actual parameters in the tag correspond to those defined by Maxwell, and are explained in detail in the regular Maxwell Render documentation.

Maxwell Preferences
The plugin adds a Maxwell page to C4D's Preferences. The parameters in this page are used to control various aspects of how the plugin works.

Material Preferences

The Sampling Level, Preview Scene, and Viewport textures parameters are used when new Materials are created. Texture projection is used to set the projection for the texture tags associated when plugin Materials are assigned to objects. The Preview threads value determines how many threads to use when rendering previews for plugin Materials. Enable MXM Linking when MXM files are imported simply controls whether MXM Linking will be activated for materials when they are imported from MXM files.
Note: in versions prior to C4D R12, the Enable/Disable Real-time Material Preview option is also contained here, rather than as a button in the material editor, as described in Enable/Disable Real-time Preview on page 38.

Paths

These paths, in addition to the normal C4D Texture Paths, will be searched when attempting to locate missing textures and MXM files. Whereas the C4D Texture Paths are not searched recursively, these paths each provide a Depth value, which is used to determine how many directories deep to search under the specified location.

In addition to the paths listed here and those set in C4D's Texture Paths, the plugin also recursively searches the following locations:

• /Maxwell 2.0/materials database/mxm files
• /Maxwell 2.0/materials database/textures
• /Maxwell 2.0/hdri

Checking the Don't search standard Maxwell directories option will cause the plugin not to add these paths to the search list. Note that changes made to the search paths require a restart of C4D before they may take effect – in general, adding paths will have an affect during the session, but removing them will not.

Defaults and Actions

If you have entered an Output Name here, it will be used for exporting when no name has been set in the Scene being exported. If no Output Name is set here, and there is also no name in the Scene, then the document name will be used. Similarly, if you have entered an Output Folder here, it will be used when none is specified in the Scene, while if there is none set, the plugin will try to use the path of the current document, or the current directory if the document has not been saved yet.
You can specify the plugin's document-overwriting policy using the last item. The choices are to use a warning dialog, to always overwrite existing files, or to automatically rename the output. When using automatic renaming, an incremental number will be appended to the filename if the specified file already exists.

File browser startup directories

The paths entered here will be used to set the startup directory for file-browser dialogs which are started from the plugin's Material Editor user-interface. When the option is enabled, the directories specified will be used for the first browsing for each file type; subsequent browsing will continue from the last-browsed directory for the file type. Note that this feature is not effective for files browsed from Attributes Manager parameters, and also that it may not work at all on C4D versions earlier than R10.5. If you do not wish the plugin to attempt to perform this action, enable the Allow Cinema to decide option.


Maxwell MXS Import Preferences
The plugin adds an MXS Import page to C4D's Import/Export Preferences.

Options

Maxwell MXS files contain mesh geometry in a meter-sized scale; depending on the scale you have set in C4D's Units Preferences, you may need to scale your MXS imports by some factor, and this is done using the Scale Factor parameter; all geometry will be scaled by this amount (i.e. scaled up 1000x in the screenshot above) when it is imported.
Maxwell MXS files use the concept of a currently-selected camera; when an MXS is imported, it is this camera which will be used to define C4D's Render Settings. Using the Selected Camera parameter, it is possible to override the camera selected in the MXS and use another one.

Filtering

Using the parameters in this group, it is possible to define what should and what should not be imported from MXS files.

Create Scene Object: read the settings contained in the MXS and use them to create a Scene Object

• Import cameras: determines whether or not to import cameras from the MXS
• Import materials: determines whether or not to import materials from the MXS
• Import Meshes: determines whether or not to import meshes from the MXS
• Meshes to include (CSV): a list of names specifying which meshes may be included in the import
• Meshes to exclude (CSV): a list of names specifying which meshes must be excluded from the import

The first four are fairly self-explanatory. The last two use string-matching on the provided list to accomplish their function. So, given the value for Meshes to include shown above, only meshes whose names begin with cube and sphere will be imported. That is to say, objects with names such as cube1, cube.1, cubeAnything, sphereLight, etc.

Other

The Import Commands (CSV) parameter is a variable-length list of strings, separated by commas, which represent other commands that the plugin will use to tailor the created C4D document during MXS import. Currently, only three import commands are supported:

norender: specifies that Render Settings > Regular Image will be disabled in the document

• motionvector: specifies that Motion Vector should be enabled in Multi-Pass
• objectid: specifies that Object ID should be enabled in Multi-Pass

Other commands may be added in the future.

Notes

The parameters presented above are also available when opening an MXS file with C4D via the command-line. Their names in this case are only slightly different, but their functions are the same:

• -scalecorrelates to the Scale Factor parameter; specified as such: -scale:1000
• -cameracorrelates to the Selected Camera parameter; specified as such: -camera:mainCamera
• -nodataequivalent to un-checking the Create Scene Object option
• -nocamerasequivalent to un-checking the Import cameras option
• -nomaterialsequivalent to un-checking the Import materials option
• -nomeshesequivalent to un-checking the Import meshes option
• -includecorrelates to the Meshes to include (CSV) parameter, specified as such: -include:cube,sphere
• -excludecorrelates to the Meshes to exclude (CSV) parameter, specified as such: -exclude:cube,sphere
• -commandscorrelates to the Import Commands (CSV), specified as such: -commands:norender,motionvector

Using these command-line versions of the MXS import options, it is possible to batch-convert a series of MXS files into C4D files. It is not possible to batch-render them in C4D (i.e. by using the -render C4D command-line option) though, because C4D does not pass the command-line to the plugin until after it has opened and rendered the specified file; in that case, the values specified in Preferences > Import/Export > Maxwell MXS Import will be used instead, as they are the only ones available to the plugin at the time of import.
Also note that currently, normals are not imported from the MXS file; they are calculated by C4D after the geometry has been imported. Also not currently supported for import are instances, and material selections.

Convert Cinema Materials (command)

This command is provided for the purpose of translating native C4D materials into Maxwell Materials. Several options for controlling exactly how this is done are provided.

How should the conversion be performed?

Firstly, there are three mutually-exclusive options; all will create new Maxwell Materials and add them to the C4D Material Manager. Optionally, the choice may be made to also create duplicates of existing Texture tags with the newly-created Maxwell Materials assigned to them. Alternatively, instead of duplicating existing Texture tags, the plugin can also directly replace the material assignments of the existing tags with the newly-created Maxwell Materials.
The choice is also given whether the plugin ought to perform conversion of all existing C4D materials, or just the ones which are currently-selected in the C4D Material Manager. Optionally, the plugin will render previews for all converted materials automatically, on a background thread.

Render Cinema procedural textures to disk?

This section works in a way identical to that of the corresponding section of the Scene object.

Notes on automatic C4D material conversion

It is not possible to make a direct mapping between how C4D and Maxwell materials work; the models used are just completely different. That said the plugin does go to a fairly great length in its attempt to translate native C4D materials into useful Maxwell representations. Here is how the C4D channels and parameters are translated:
Color:Color and Brightness will be used to determine the resulting Maxwell material's basic color, which is controlled using the Reflectance 0 color of its base BSDF. If a texture is specified in the C4D material, it will be placed in the base BSDF's Reflectance 0 map channel. If the texture is procedural then it will be mixed with the C4D material's Color and Brightness parameters using the specified Mix Mode and Mix Strength.
Diffusion:Brightness will be used to influence the basic color of the generated Maxwell material. If a texture is specified, it will be used in the most reflective layer of the generated Maxwell material. If the texture is procedural, it will also be used to generate a new map for the base BSDF's Reflectance 0 channel; basically, this could be though of as a dynamically-generated 'dirt' map which combines the basic Reflectance 0 color of the BSDF with the procedural diffusion map. As with a procedural Color map, the appearance of this map will be influenced by the Mix Mode and Mix Strength parameters.
Luminance: When activated, the plugin will create a Maxwell Emitter material. In this case, any other C4D channels will be ignored. If an HDR (i.e. mxi, hdr, exr) texture is specified, then this will be used to create the Maxwell material as an image-based emitter; otherwise, the output color will be determined using the C4D Color parameter, while the output power will be determined using the C4D Brightness parameter. Output power for auto-generated emitters is always specified in lux (lumens per m²) to ensure that output power scales reasonably with different scene sizes.
Note: if the luminance color is effectively pure black, and there is also no file-based or procedural texture in the channel, this channel will be treated as if it were disabled.
Specular: The plugin will create a plasticine or metallic Material, depending on the Mode parameter. When set to metallic, a single BSDF will be created and its Reflectance 90 channel will be set to a weaker version of the C4D material's basic color. Otherwise, a 2-layer plasticine material will be created. In either case, the C4D Width parameter will be used to control the material's roughness, in order to give a reflective response similar to that of the C4D material.
Transparency: When activated, the plugin will create a dielectric Maxwell material. In this case, the Color and Specular channels in the C4D material will be ignored, if they are activated, and instead the Color and Brightness parameters in the Transparency channel will be used to determine the base BSDF's Transmittance color. If a texture is specified, then it will be placed in the BSDF's Transmittance map. It is important to use a realistic Refraction value, as this will be directly translated by the plugin, and will be placed in the BSDF's Nd field. The attenuation of the BSDF will be set using the Cinema Absorption distance, factoring for the current scene scale. The Blurriness parameter will be used to increase the material's attenuation, and also to add some roughness, again in an attempt to approximate what would be seen in the C4D material being converted.
Note: if the transparency color is effectively pure black, and there is also no file-based or procedural texture in the channel, this channel will be treated as if it were disabled. Also, if there a map is specified, and that map contains only greyscale values, the Transparency channel will be used as an alpha channel instead.
Bump:the texture specified here will be placed in the Maxwell Material's Global Bump channel, with the Strength parameter being translated into the Global Bump value
Normal: This works similarly to the Bump channel, except that the map will have normal mapping enabled, and the values specified for Flip X and Flip Y will be transferred into their corresponding places in the Maxwell bump channel.
Alpha: A texture found here will be placed in the Mask map of each layer in the material, producing a clip-mapped Maxwell Material. If the texture specified resides in a C4D library, and uses alpha-channel to accomplish clipping, then this map will be translated by the plugin and saved to disk as a black-and-white Maxwell-style clip map.
Displacement: The texture specified here will be placed in the Maxwell Material's Displacement layer, with the Strength and Height parameters being used to set the Maxwell displacement Height.

Non-GUI Rendering

In addition to the standard GUI-based methods provided by the plugin, it is also possible to ask the plugin to render a Scene via C.O.F.F.E.E (or C++/Python/etc.) code. Here is an example of how to do that (in C.O.F.F.E.E):

// Maxwell plugin command IDs
var renderToMxs = 1024908;
var renderToStudio = 1024907;
var renderToNetwork = 1027368;
var renderActiveView = 1024906;
var renderRenderView = 1024905;
// we can render the first scene found:
SpecialEventAdd(renderRenderView);
// ...or we can get the active Cinema doc
var doc = GetActiveDocument();
if (doc)
{
// find the desired Maxwell Scene Object
var scene = doc->FindObject("my.scene");
if (scene)
{
// ...and tell it to render:
scene->Message(renderRenderView);
}
}

It is also possible to render in Maxwell when starting Cinema from the command-line. In this case, it is always the first Maxwell Scene Object found in the Cinema document which will be rendered; if none is found, an error will be reported. All that is necessary is to add the -rendermxs flag to the command-line:

> "[path to cinema 4d.exe]" "c:\doc.c4d" -nogui -rendermxs

When this command-line is executed, C4D will be started in 'nogui' mode, and the first Maxwell Scene Object found in doc.c4d will be rendered in Maxwell Render. The parameters contained in the Scene Object will be used; for example, if the Scene Object has Animation enabled, an animation will be exported and rendered. Additionally, it is possible to override various parameters specified in the Scene Object. This is done by putting them directly on the Cinema command-line. When doing so, parameter values should never be quoted, and spaces should be encoded using +20. Several plugin-specific commands are available:

• -outputdirOverrides Scene Object > Output > Folder. Usage: -outputdir:c:\dir+20name+20with+20spaces.
• -outputnameOverrides Scene Object > Output > Name. Usage: -outputname:output+20name+20with+20spaces.
• -outputformatOverrides Scene Object > Output > Name > Extension/Depth. Usage: -outputformat:tif32.
• -framesEnables animation, using the specified frame range (separated by a dash). Usage: -frames:2-24.
• -framestepIf animation is enabled, this parameter overrides the animation frame step value. Usage: -framestep:3.
• -cmdlineModifies the Scene Object command-line. Usage: -cmdline:append (the default) or -cmdline:override.
• -scenenameUse this to specify that a particular Scene Object be rendered. Usage: -scenename:Scene+20Name.

Regarding the -cmdline option, the values appended to (or used to override) the Scene Object command-line parameters (i.e. Scene Object > Engine > Command Line), are communicated by placing them directly on the C4D command-line. Note that since C4D also uses the -nogui command, you must use Maxwell Render's -n alias for this parameter instead. Here is an example command-line, which renders a series of frames from a given C4D file:

> "[path to cinema 4d.exe]" "c:\doc.c4d" -nogui -rendermxs -outputdir:c:\new+20output+20dir
-outputname:new+20output+20name -outputformat:png16 -frames:1-21 -framestep:2 -cmdline:override
-channel:alpha,on,32,tif -channel:material,on,16,png -th:4 -sl:5.65 -nomxi -n -nowait

Exposure values (ISO 100 speed) for various lighting conditions

(table from wikipedia.org @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value)